God, Time, and Eternity: The Coherence of Theism II: Eternity [Hardcover]

hose who think about time are thinking deeply. Those who think about God T are thinking even more deeply still. Those who try to think about God and time are pressing the very limits of human understanding. Undaunted, this is precisely the project which we have set for ourselves in this study: to try to grasp the nature of divine eternity, to understand what is meant by the amnnation that God is etemal, to fonnulate a coherent doctrine ofGod's relationship with time. This study, the second installment of a long-range research pro gram devoted to a philosophical analysis of the principal attributes of God, flows naturally out of my previous exploration of divine omniscience. ! For the most contentious issue with respect to God's being omniscient concerns divine foreknowledge of future contingents, such as free acts of human agents. The very concept of foreknowledge presupposes that God is temporal, and a good many thinkers, from Boethius to certain contemporary philosophers, have thought to avoid the alleged incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom by afflnning the timelessness of God. Thus, in examining the complex of issues surrounding the foreknowledge question, we found ourselves already immersed in the question of divine eternity.1 The Case for Divine Timelessness.- 2 Timelessness and Personhood.- 3 Timelessness and Divine Action.- 4 Timelessness and Divine Knowledge.- 5 The Classical Concept of Time.- 6 Gods Time and Relativistic Time.- 7 God, Time, and Relativity.- 8 Creatio ex nihilo.- 9 God and the Beginning of Time.- Proper Name Index.

From the reviews:

William Craig makes a persuasive case for the A- (tensed) theory of time and against the B- (tenseless) theory of time. & Craigs scholarly work, which expertly integrates philosophy, science, and theology, deserves to be read widely. (Paul Copan, The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. LVI (223), 2003)